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Liminal Thinking and the Use of Geography in Old English Orosius

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Liminal Thinking and the Use of Geography in Old English Orosius HISTORIA STUDIA WARMIŃSKIE 56 (2019) ISSN 0137-6624 DOI: 10.31648/sw.3252 Mateusz Fafinski Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut Freie Universität Berlin1 Faraway, So Close: Liminal Thinking and the Use of Geography in Old English Orosius Słowa kluczowe: wczesne średniowiecze; narratologia; historia uniwersalna; język staroan- gielski; peryferia. Keywords: Early Middle Ages; narratology; Old English; periphery; universal history. Introduction. A Peripheral Duality2 The Old English Orosius is an early medieval adaptation of Paulus Orosius’ Historiae Adversum Paganos. The exact date and place of cre- ation of this text have been contested – notwithstanding its earlier asso- ciation with King Alfred, it is now assumed to be slightly later in date, probably written early in the 10th century.3 This text can be seen as a work between two extremes. Mary Kate Hurley has brilliantly exposi- ted the conflicted temporalities of the text and the fluctuating nature of its narrator. (Hurley, 2013) She writes about the two “nows” present in the text – the now of the 5th century and the now of the 9th and 10th cen- turies. (Hurley, 2013, p. 405–406) These temporal planes (that for metho- dological ease and to stress their linguistic aspect I shall call nunc for the 5th and nu for the 9th and 10th centuries) constitute two extremities of its narrative. But those planes also intertwine and create a liminal space in which the demarcations are less sharp – a narrative twilight in which the periphery swells and gains new importance. The broader the periphery is 1 Mateusz Fafinski, Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin, Koserstr. 20, 14195 Berlin, [email protected], https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1637-8174. 2 The author would like to thank Sarah Schlüssel and Jakob Riemenschneider for their help- ful comments on the draft of this paper. 3 See Godden 2011; arguments for a slightly earlier dating can be found in Bately 2014; as for the ‘Alfredian’ authorship of the text it has actually never been widely accepted and was thorough- ly disproved in Liggins 1970. 424 Mateusz Fafinski Historia the less defined it has to be – but also, it can contain much more meaning. The text gains through those divided temporalities a peripheral duality – it is stretched between two poles both chronologically and geographical- ly. This duality makes the Old English Orosius an exercise in liminal thin- king – a practice of defining the centre from the periphery. Looking at the text of the Old English Orosius through that lens, in hope of better under- standing its motives, shall be the guiding research principle of this article. In this paper, I will look at the Old English Orosius from a narrative point of view, and try to trace the shards of liminal thinking understood as a narrative practice. Through an analysis of the narrative strategies of the composite Adaptor4 we will try to see the way in which this text was forged out of the periphery and how liminality, in its many forms, played a crucial role in the Adaptor’s ideological programme. Finally, we shall see how the inclusion of the accounts of voyages by Ohthere and Wulfstan is not a mere afterthought but a plausible continuation of this programme. Why is the Adaptor so concerned with the expansion of the periphery? My goal in this article is to show that the Old English Orosius exhibits a remarkable preoccupation with the liminal. Not just liminal in a narrow, geographical sense, but also liminal on a manuscript page and liminal in linguistic understanding. This is not a coincidence. To see this, a combined methodological approach needs to be applied, looking at the Old English Orosius both as a product of a broader narrative tradition and as a tool in the very current early medieval debates on periphery and universality. To achieve this, we need to use both historiographic methods – placing the work of the Adaptor in a broader context – as well as a narratological analy- sis of the text itself. Through this approach, we might be able to better un- derstand the role of the liminal in the text of the Old English Orosius. The Textual Margin and a Geographical Periphery The work of the Adaptor was possible thanks to a number of develop- ments. The particular historical context in which the text has been cre- ated plays a crucial part. Maybe the most important of those develop- ments (apart from the very existence of Historiae adversum paganos and 4 The question of who was the author of Old English Orosius and in what context the work was created has been discussed and summarised by Godden (Godden, 2012), although no doubt it will attract further considerations. In this text I have decided to use the term “Adaptor”, as it stresses the curatorial practices embedded in the making of the text and the creative nature of their translation. We might not know the name or names of the Adaptor, but, as this article tries to show, we can actually say quite a lot about their motivations and practices. They are, therefore, anonymous only in the narrowest sense of the word. Faraway, So Close: Liminal Thinking and the Use of Geography... 425 Studia Warmińskie 56 (2019) the practice of Old English vernacular literature) is to be found before the work on the Old English text even commenced. The long tradition of glos- sing Orosius forms, upon close reading of the Old English Orosius, the key to its creation. As Godden has established, the Adaptor has probably worked from a copy of Historiae made somewhere on the Continent, perhaps in an East Francian milieu. (Godden, 2011) Therefore, they were part of a narrative community which had its own preoccupations and areas of focus. The glosses were of course connected, but not necessarily constra- ined, by the original goals and concerns of Orosius. The Adaptor, together with the Continental glossators, formed what we could call a narrative community – a group sharing similar narrative strategies that arose from their particular preoccupations and guided their writing. This community has pushed the periphery (both geographically and cognitively) further than Orosius had imagined or intended. The membership of that commu- nity gave the Adaptor a mediated access to classical works they could not have possessed in Britain. Some of the results of those strategies were in- corporated in the body of the Old English text, thus re-centering them from the margins and putting the outcomes of liminal thinking at the very heart of their undertaking. From their perspective, the antique sour- ces used to expand the original narrative of Orosius existed as a textual periphery – as glosses and marginalia – and by incorporating them inside the text of their adaptation, they bring them back to the centre. This nar- rative circle was preoccupied not only geographically but also textually with the same subjects as the peripheries of the Carolingian world – but understood, thanks to their textual interests, as an extension of Rome. This community (and the strategies that it developed) was very much an imagined one, driven by the shared experience of texts read and knowled- ge passed but very much composed of people who had no direct contact with each other (Anderson 2006, p. 6–7). There are other reasons why the glossing tradition was important. Godden’s theory that the source text of the Adaptor was a heavy glossed East Francian manuscript of Historiae might also help to explain the oc- casional Hungarians and Bulgarians appearing in the text – the “near Others” of the Carolingian world (OEO, p. 291). The geographical intere- sts in those glosses might reflect the preoccupations of an unknown St Gall glossator (Lozovsky, 2006, p. 340–346). Those glosses are also, in turn, the results of the narrative community’s remarkable preoccupations with a geographical periphery, looking over the liminal and through the porous membrane that simultaneously divided and connected the “inside” and the “outside” of the imperial worlds of the 9th century. “Insides” and “outsides” are, of course, relative and forced terms. 426 Mateusz Fafinski Historia The text itself is characterised sometimes by an extreme fluidity of classifications. To see a glaring example, one needs to look no further than the Adaptor’s description of “Germania”, itself possibly also rooted in an East Frankish tradition (Godden, 2011, p. 316). That definition was extremely broad, encompassing land from the Don to the Rhine, but spe- cifically excluded Britain5 (OEO, 2016, p. 33). Geographical descriptors are constructed by the Adaptor within the narrative community, but with a relative ease and flexibility. The Adaptor gained their knowledge from the margin and from the intertextual space, where the glosses are nesting – i.e. from a layout peri- phery. This connection should not surprise us, as the textual periphery and the practice of Old English translation are very closely intertwined. Enough to think here of the Leiden glossary and how the practice (and experience) of a commentary gloss linked the patristic and historical works of Late Antiquity (the nunc) with the vernacular nu. The particu- lar interest of the Leiden glossary in Late Antiquity works is a great example of such practice6 (Lapidge, 2008, p. 33). The periphery of a text forms the connective tissue of the narrative community – the Old English Orosius is quite literally born out of a textual fringe. The fluid nature of both the text and form of Old English Orosius is perhaps its defining feature, obscured by just two complete surviving ma- nuscript witnesses of the adaptation. The mouldable phase of the text of Old English Orosius lasts not only between the Late Roman Empire and the early medieval England (accommodating, so to speak, the textual criticism on the Historiae), but longer, into its manuscript receptions.
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